


these willful souls

by CanIHaveAHug



Category: RWBY
Genre: :D, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Child Abuse, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Depression, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Manipulation, Family Drama, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Torture, Self-Esteem Issues, Sister-Sister Relationship, Stalking, Tags May Change, Toxic Relationship, Unreliable Narrator, Victim-blaming, Violence, and various other things to come, but THEY GROW UP this time!, but she sure ain’t gonna get it, currently: author definitely has a plot!, domestic abuse, from watching their parents nearly(?) murder each other, hand-waving some magic laws bc CRWBY refuses to explain anything, oh imma do this poor man SUCH a dirty, some bittersweet fluff, the genocidal war-lady too bc yikes she needs help, tiny children with ASD and PTSD, update: author has plot ideas!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-04-06 22:41:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanIHaveAHug/pseuds/CanIHaveAHug
Summary: “S-stop it!” his eldest daughter cried, stuttering high and heartbroken, andno no no,he thought frantically,why are you still here?“Stop fighting! Stop it,please! Stop,stop fighting, Mama, Papa, please stop fighting, pleaseplease-!”..Salem won the battle, all those years ago.Ozma remained. Four daughters survived. Salem had what she wanted.But their story was no happier for it.





	1. the end of halcyon days

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably gonna be exactly as much of a mess as you think it will. 
> 
> hopefully with a happy ending, but honestly you never know ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Ozma had believed that for all her faults, Salem would always adore their daughters. For them she would move mountains, would split seas, would pluck the glittering stars from the sky and put it in their palms... and he’d loved her for it.

Yet as the years went by, he’d also _feared_. There was no denying his wife’s growing nonchalance for slaughter, nor her predilection for shows of power, and neither tendency sat well with him. Surely there was a way to unite the world without resorting to so, _so much_ bloodshed? Yet no matter what doubts he voiced, Salem insisted that _this_ was the way, that escalation was inevitable, and without an alternative to offer… what else could he do, but believe her?

Then he learned her true goal. Her true intentions for the peoples that walked the land.

Her intentions for their _children_.

And so it came to this.

Salem, looming over him, gem-like eyes luminous with her rage, and sweet mouth he once kissed so softly now twisted into a snarl. There wasn’t a single hint of injury or blemish on her; her curse granted her the benefit of remaining as untouched as when the battle had begun, and against that--against _true_ immortality--Ozma had been but a mortal man. Now fallen, body broken and bleeding out in dust and rubble, Ozma could only pray hopelessly to long-gone gods that the children had managed to flee as he’d told them to.

Salem’s fists trembled at her sides. “How _dare you.”_

Three words, spat out with wrath and serrated edges. Ozma gasped as her heel dug into his wounds, wretched agony blooming anew.

“How _dare you!”_ she cried again, and Ozma did not have the breath to reply. “How _dare_ you try to steal them from me! How dare you _leave me_ like this!”

With each word she twisted her foot, seemed to sink an inch deeper into the gaping gash, and Ozma convulsed beneath her, scrabbling uselessly at the ground, at her leg, wanting it to _stop stop stop-_

“After all I’ve done for you,” she breathed, voice so dangerously low, so dangerously _hurt,_ and Ozma felt that pang again, that guilt he’d ignored since making his decision- “and _this_ is how you repay me?”

His thoughts tumbled, but his body gathered itself. It heaved breath into its lungs, opened its mouth- “Sa-”

Salem sneered. Her foot came up, and slammed back down.

Ozma heard the echo of his own screams as though from beneath the depths of an river.

“We _finally_ had freedom,” Salem said, and her eyes narrowed with disgust. “But you just _throw it all away.”_

She raised her arm, and it wreathed itself in flame and death.

And Ozma knew, without a shadow of doubt, it was over.

“I-” _am so sorry._

Salem narrowed her eyes and aimed.

_“NO!”_

Ozma’s heart stopped. He just barely registered the frightened voice, the small weight throwing itself over him, falling against Salem’s leg, he just barely noticed the flicker of magic, the flimsy glow of a shield-

“S-stop it!” his eldest daughter cried, stuttering high and heartbroken, and _no no no,_ he thought frantically, _why are you still here?_ “Stop fighting! Stop it, _please!_ _Stop,_ stop fighting, Mama, Papa, please stop fighting, please _please-!”_

“Gwyneira!” The stumbling pitter-patter of three followed the first, and with his heart sinking in his chest, Ozma watched the rest of his children come into view.

Orlagh, her brown dress torn at the hems, gasped with wide eyes and came racing to his side in an instant. “Papa! Papa, are you okay?!”

His youngest, Florence, was quick to waddle after her, arms hugging herself in the absence of her favorite toy. “P-papa…”

Hoshimi, more hesitant than her sisters and half hidden behind a crumbled wall, nonetheless stuck out from the grey in her sakura pink dress, with messy braids fallen over her face. Tears glistened quietly on her cheeks. “...Mama?”

 _You’re not hurt,_ a part of Ozma thought with relief.

 _You’re still_ **_here_** _,_ the other thought with fear.

Without warning, Salem’s foot left Ozma’s gut with a sticky _squelch,_ and Gwyneira was dragged along with it off his chest. Ozma inhaled sharply, vision whiting out from pain, but he had to stay awake, he had to _protect them-_

“Girls,” he heard Salem say--gently, as she could sometimes, “would you come over here?”

The girls hesitated. Gwyneira glanced over her shoulder at Ozma, then at the hole in his abdomen. Her face paled to the color of snow she was named for.

 _“Girls,”_ Salem said again, more firmly this time, as Ozma tried to make his body do _something_ more than just lay there and _wheeze-_ “Come here. Now.” A beat, and then: “Papa can’t heal if you’re all crowding him.”

Papa can’t heal at all, Ozma thought pointlessly, not from this, not like their mother, but Ozma knew the girls didn’t understand that yet. Mama and Papa are both magic, and magic gives Mama the ability to heal from anything, so why wouldn’t Papa have the ability too?

Slowly, gradually, the girls withdrew from him and went towards their mother. Watching them, Ozma continued to bleed out on the ground, useless, as dread and blood flooded the back of his throat and weariness leadened his limbs into deadweights.

 _Don’t punish them for what I did,_ Ozma begged with his eyes. Salem met them evenly. _Don’t harm them out of anger again, Salem, please…_

“Mama…” Hoshimi mumbled nervously, and hunched just a smidgen closer to her twin when her mother’s red eyes fell upon her. Orlagh grabbed her sister’s hand without a word. “Why- why were you and Papa fighting?”

Salem gazed at each of her children. Gwyneira wiping her eyes, Orlagh holding onto Hoshimi, tiny Florence sniffling with an arm wrapped around herself and the other clutching Gwyneira’s cobalt-blue dress.

“What did your father say when he woke you?” Ozma heard her ask without inflection, eyes boring down into the eldest.

Gwyneira scuffed her feet, and then said, “He… he said we were going outside. He said we were in danger, and we had to be quiet.”

“I see.” Salem pursed her lips, and then slowly, crouched to the girls’ eye level. “Well, your father lied to you.”

“He… did?”

“Oh yes.” Salem reached out for Hoshimi’s braids and began fixing them idly. The girl went stone-still. “You weren’t in danger. But he was going to do something _very_ selfish, so I had to stop him.”

“Selfish?” Orlagh sounded astonishingly suspicious for a seven-year old. “But selfish is bad! Papa’s not bad!”

Salem’s lips thinned and her eyes stormed, but when she spoke, her voice was restrained. “Well just this once- Papa was _bad.”_

Her eyes found Ozma’s, and the blazing hatred he saw there curdled what little blood remained in his body.

“Papa was going to put you all in danger, girls,” she said, her voice an eerie calm. “Papa was going to steal you from _me,_ from your _home._ He would have made you live among savage _commoners_ , and would have led you to a life full of struggle and hardship. You would be very unhappy out there, but that’s where he wants to take you.” In the girls’ confused silence, she tugged the last of Hoshimi’s braid down, and then she smiled coldly. “So Papa is going to be put on, ah, _time-out_ for a while.”

 _Time out?_ Ozma thought, and the childish term put a strange dread in his bones. Then-

Oh. _Oh._

It wasn’t as though he didn’t expect it. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know he deserved Salem’s hatred, her fury, or any of the consequences that came with betraying the woman he’d sworn himself to. But he’d thought- he’d hoped, at least, to get far enough that the children would be safe, that they wouldn’t be in Salem’s grasp nor at risk of becoming collateral when she inevitably came hunting him down.

 _I’m sorry,_ Ozma thought, vision swimming as unconsciousness finally began to take hold. _I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

But he knew how little the sentiment meant. His eyes slid shut on the sight of Salem once more looming over him, her hands glowing with malevolence, and he already knew he would never be forgiven.


	2. the halcyon days | 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They were going to be a happy family once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there be time-skipping and frolicking 'round here.

Ozma remembered a day he’d spent hours searching for his wife, only to find her sitting in the nursery, where a slumbering Gwyneira rested in her crib and sunlight drifted lazily into the cornflower-blue room.

He’d smiled then, and after shutting the door behind him, wrapped his arms around his wife’s shoulders from behind and sat his chin atop her head. “Have you been here all day, love?” he asked with a bit of teasing when she startled.

Ozma felt her hum beneath his arms. “Perhaps,” Salem answered vaguely, leaning into him. Her head tilted. “Now get down here and give me a proper greeting, you tip-toeing menace.”

With a low chuckle, he obliged with enthusiasm, bending down and pressing a kiss to the woman’s two pale cheeks. Her appreciative hum was a gratifying reward. That settled, the two parents watched their first daughter snore gently with a smile each on their faces.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Salem whispered.

“Indeed,” Ozma agreed, and a happy affection bloomed in his soul. “Much like her mother, I’d say.”

His wife clicked her tongue and swatted him lightly. “Oh please.”

“What?” He raised a brow. “She’ll have her mother’s grace, I bet you. Her mother’s poise, her mother’s smile…”

“But not her father’s charm, hopefully,” Salem huffed, “or we’ll surely never be rid of all the suitors lining up at her door.”

Yet for all the disapproval in her tone, the redness in her cheeks betrayed her. Ozma grinned. If there was any boon to be found in Salem’s unfortunate dip into the Pools of Grimm, it was how her snow-white complexion made her delightfully easy to read nowadays.

Overcome by whim, Ozma bent down again and pecked another kiss to his wife’s pink cheeks. Then her temples, and her nose, and the tips of her eyes, and just as Salem was beginning to squirm and giggled out a reproachful “Ozma-!” he captured her lips and didn’t let go until he’d dragged a deep sigh out of her throat.

He leaned back again, chest warm with content. “I love you,” he murmured.

“I know.” Salem shuddered against him. “Even though I can’t understand why.”

Ozma blinked. That was… not the response he’d been expecting, though it was quiet enough she may not have meant for him to hear.

“You were yourself,” Ozma said honestly. And if something uncertain twinged at the back of his mind, if something pointed out small incongruities of the woman he knew and the woman he’d known, it was easily ignored.

Salem had been the woman eager to see the world. She’d been the woman who’d viewed lion blossoms for the first time with a childlike fascination, who’d been enthralled by the singing of a young farmhand at nightfall, who’d danced as wild as forest fae at a village’s harvest festival… and who’d reminded him--in the midst of his grand adventures and larger-than-life ideals--of how to see _wonder_ in the simplest of things.

His wife tilted her head a smidgen and gave him a strangely intent look. “Do you still think I am ‘myself?’”

 _(salem lives,_ he remembered, _but the woman you hold dear in your memories-)_

Ozma flashed a grin he didn’t quite feel. “Is that meant to be a riddle, my lady?”

When his joke garnered him nothing but unreadable eyes, Ozma let his light-heartedness fall. Quietly he stepped around the chair, sank to his knees in front of his wife, and took her hands in his, caressing the pale knuckles like they were the softest of flower petals.

“Do my words ring false to you, Salem?” he asked, raising his gaze without accusation.

Salem frowned. “...No.”

“Then is there something you’d like to talk to me about?”

His wife’s eyes flickered away from his.

Ozma knit his brows with concern. “If there is, you don’t have to tell me until you’re comfortable with it.”

 _The same way she, unknowingly, does for you,_ some errant part of him added with dark amusement.

“But… What can I do to ease this doubt in you?” he implored, ignoring the unhelpful little whisper. “How can I be better for you?”

Beside them, little Gwyneira shifted in her sleep, moving her tiny lips soundlessly. Salem watched her, the most precious symbol of their union, with bright rapture in her eyes, visibly mulling over her response. After a moment, she turned back to face Ozma.

“You promised once that you’d always be by my side,” she said, with the air of someone weighing each word before speaking them. “But then you died.”

Ozma’s heart tightened painfully in his chest, the cooly spoken statement striking him like an arrow.

He felt Salem’s hands twist in his grasp and squeeze his fingers gently before he could muster a reply. “And by some miracle… you then returned to me.” Her eyes darkened. “But it’s been so long, so much has changed... I feel I can no longer trust simple words.”

“Salem…” Ozma swallowed, stomach sinking with guilt. “I never wanted to leave you. If there was any way, _any_ way at all to come back sooner, I-!”

“I know, I know,” Salem interrupted, hushing him with a melancholic smile. “I’m not _blaming_ you. And I don’t mean to ask anything of you…” Her words trailed off into a self-depreciative sigh. “I just… hope you’ll understand now, my moments of skepticism…?”

And oh, he did. He did, and he could not help but ache for his lover and the pain he saw in her fragile eyes. Pain that reminded him of a quiet night under the summer moon, when a passionate young woman had trusted him with her inner scars, had wept for all the things her father had stolen from her… and centuries later, had told him, with tears in her eyes, how his love made her feel _human_ again.

There was a fire now in Ozma’s soul, and he set his jaw with a new promise on his tongue.

“You can test me as many times as you’d like,” he said stoutly, and Salem’s eyes sharpened. “Whenever you’d like. My feelings for you will never change, and I will prove it to you however many times you need to see it.”

His wife, his lover, did not reply for a long moment, studying his expression silently. Then she inclined her head with a smile and said, “…I’ll hold you to that.”

He returned the smile, willing away the strange unease in the back of his mind, because he knew he owed her this—this amazing woman who’d never stopped loving him, who’d never forgotten him, who’d never finished grieving him, even after so many centuries of being dead.

His beloved had been forced to carry this hurt, this loneliness for so, so very long. So now that he’d returned...

What kind of man would he be, to repay that tragic sort of loyalty with rejection?

_(salem lives…_

_-I’ll do it.)_


End file.
